LTSP - Wilda Gafney

Other new faculty appointments:
Frederick H. Borsch,
H.S. Wilson

Wilda Gafney to teach Homiletics,
Old Testament for LTSP, LTSG

Wilda Gafney PHILADELPHIA (May 23, 2003) - The Rev. Wilda C. M. Gafney begins her work soon as a new seminary professor with a richly diverse portfolio. This summer she officially joins the faculties of Philadelphia and Gettysburg Seminaries as assistant professor of Old Testament and Homiletics. She is the first African American woman to serve on the LTSP faculty. The position has been made possible by a grant from the Teagle Foundation.

A native of Maryland, Pastor Gafney is a scholar with at least 10 awards, scholarships and fellowships to her credit, including doctoral and dissertation fellowships from the Fund for Theological Education, a Vernon Johns preaching Award and a Duke University Women's Studies Graduate Fellowship. She anticipates receiving her Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from Duke this summer. She's a third-generation soldier, having followed her father's military footsteps. She recently completed five years of service as a chaplain in the Army Reserves as pastor to a hospital congregation and providing psychiatric pastoral care. Wilda Gafney was baptized in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, belonged to a non-denominational congregation as a teen "because my Mother liked the youth program there," attended a Baptist school during her junior high years, a Catholic high school and rounded things off by graduating from Earlham College, a Quaker school, in 1987 with a B.A. in Biology. She earned her M.Div. in 1997 from Howard University School of Divinity with Special Recognition in Homiletics and Hebrew Bible. She has been proclaiming the Word for 11 years since her liscensure in the AME Zion Church. Initially, she was ordained a Deacon in 1996, ordained an Elder in 1998, and received a pastoral appointment in 2001.

Wilda Gafney began her professional career as a research biologist after graduating from Earlham. She worked for an independent laboratory, which had contracts with the U.S. Navy. Her research focused on immunology and biological defense. Gafney says she "knew early that I was called to a career in clergy formation." The call blossomed during her early career when she says she experienced "a renewal of faith and was led to join the AME Zion Church." She entered seminary.

At Howard, she experienced the strong influence of Professor Gene Rice, who taught her Hebrew Bible. During the first semester, she and all the other members of Professor Rice's class failed the mid-term, she recalls. "Professor Rice displayed a model pedagogy. He was mild-mannered, committed to ethical standards and prayer and committed to making the text come alive for us without compromising scholarship. Even though we failed at first he demonstrated love and commitment to us through it all."
She also celebrates the influence of a program called "Seminarians Interacting," sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. In the program, scholars from different traditions, including Islam, studied together and considered how each of their traditions deals with such challenges as educating children, death and dying, and treatment of those inside and outside of its sphere.

She's particularly fascinated about the discipline of exegesis - interpreting scripture for the purpose of preaching, and has extensively studied the approach Reconstructionist Judaism uses to encourage active participation and worship and how the approach may be adapted to take root in the Christian context.

At Gettysburg she will focus at first on teaching Homiletics. At Philadelphia, she will concentrate on Old Testament. She expects an early course will be the same as what she taught last summer at Duke and during the Spring of 2002 at Guilford College. It's entitled "Heroines, Harlots and Handmaids: The Women of the Hebrew Scriptures." Pastor Gafney says she is particularly fascinated by Old Testament personalities "who are not included in the titles of the Books." She expects that among the gifts she will bring to the faculties of the two schools are more of a global feminist perspective and a sense of rabbinical scholarship and how to integrate that into the formation of professional leaders.